


265. broken monsters

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [24]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7565230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Nightmares,” Sarah says. It isn’t really a question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	265. broken monsters

Sarah wakes when her bed dips; her eyes snap open in the dark, and she’s reaching for the gun she keeps under her pillow before she even fully wakes up. She doesn’t know when she started keeping a gun under her pillow. She doesn’t know when the nightmares started, either. Maybe these two things are the same thing.

“It’s me,” croaks a voice, and tension drains. Sarah rolls over, slides her hand out from under the pillow, considers: Helena, lying there with her face too close to Sarah’s face. Eyes luminous. Bags under her eyes: pronounced, impossible to ignore.

“Nightmares,” Sarah says. It isn’t really a question. She shifts a little closer, as an invitation. Helena is touched-starved but will not get close until Sarah starts – until Sarah tells her that it’s okay, for Helena to want to be held.

Sarah’s leg brushes against Helena’s and then, suddenly, Helena is wrapped around Sarah like a squid. She’s uncomfortably hot. Sarah’s afraid for a second that she’s going to move, because it’s too hot. But she doesn’t. She settles. A bead of sweat trickles down Sarah’s thigh, but it’s fine, but she doesn’t want to be alone. She feels the rumbling of Helena’s heartbeat.

_You can just stay here_ , Sarah thinks with a sort of sleep-muffled urgency. Nights like this it seems easier that way: easy and good, Helena solid and snoring in the bed enough to keep the nightmares away. Nights like this Sarah doesn’t ever want to be alone.

But Helena screams, and shakes, and kicks, and clings. It’s better like this – with her down the hall, in a bed, alone. Better for all of them. Helena has never stood on her own in a place where people are willing to catch her if she falls. She should learn to.

And yet: here she is again, breathing already settling into something snuffly and – god, god, so familiar. Sarah could set the beating of her heart to that wheezing. It echoes against her ribcage.

She wants to say things. _You can just stay here. Do the nightmares ever go away. I’m proud of you. I love you. Don’t go, I don’t want to be alone._

She lies there in silence instead. One of her hands moves up and starts gently picking apart the tangles in Helena’s hair. Helena hums, a low note of such pure contentment that it also echoes in the spaces between Sarah’s bones. Her own hand comes between them, twines a coil of Sarah’s hair around her fingertips. Pulls, once, like turning on a light. Click.

_Stay_ , Sarah thinks, but it’s so easy to think that in the dark.

Her eyes half-close, and the whole world reduces itself to the blurry eyelash-haloed image of Helena and the feeling of Helena’s coarse hair under her fingertips and the gentle tug of her own hair at her scalp. Click click. Tomorrow morning they’ll wake up and Sarah will laugh, a huff of breath, make some terrible joke that means _this didn’t matter, this was –_ well. Something close enough to a mistake.

Helena will laugh too. She didn’t use to laugh like this, Sarah thinks – nervous, thin shiny brittle. In the memories of the two of them alone Helena laughed in a huge explosion of sound, unafraid. Maybe Sarah taught her how to be afraid. Maybe Sarah taught her how to lie, too, to say _I don’t want this_. To say _I do._

God. She’s too tired to be thinking about this shit.

Her eyes open back up with effort and dart to Helena’s eyes. Helena is staring at the coil of Sarah’s hair tucked around her knuckles. Sarah could ask her about her nightmares. Sarah could tell her to stay, she could, she should, she won’t.

“Tell me a story,” she says instead, words so thin they barely exist. Helena blinks, once, eyelashes brushing against her cheek. _I know. I hear_. She doesn’t look away from Sarah’s fingertips.

She opens her mouth to speak, an inhaled hush of a sound. Sarah closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to watch.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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